Just like all the earlier Bond books, HTTK is a quick read, never really slowing pace too much. The first half of the book is a typically good Bondian adventure, but once the locale changes to Nepal, the book changes to a slower pace. Benson takes you inside Bond in a way that Gardner was never able to do. Bond's general dislike for parts of his job are felt, and his cold ruthlessnes shows why he survives.

In my opinion the only flaw to Benson's newest book is the uncomfortable discriptions from many of Bond's companions. Some seem to be little more than a recorded playing of a tourist book. Fleming could always get inside what makes a location tick, while Benson is just not there yet. Yet along side this criticism, I must say that I enjoyed the Doctor's talk about the hazzards of mountain climbing.

Although many will criticize Benson as being an amateur, his Bond books are well plotted and believeable. I look forward to the rest of the trilogy and wish Benson luck with his growth as a writer. While HTTK is an experiment in the 'Bond' style, it is much more succesful than anything Gardner tried, or Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me.

CHris


Bond keeps limping along...   June 22, 1999
 3 out of 3 found this review helpful

I'm sorry, but one would have a difficult time convincing me that John Gardner was a worse Bond novelist than Raymond Benson. Gardner's best books--Death is Forever, Icebreaker, No Deals, Mr. Bond (in my humble opinion)--stand out from Benson's effort in a number of ways. Gardner admitted that he was more distant when he wrote Bond because it was not his character, and sometimes that wasn't bad. Some of the books were refreshing in that they were a kind of admission that Bond didn't have to save the world in every single book, but that he had missions where he was not central and where he questioned what he doing. Gardner's Bond seems weary in Death is Forever or in The Man from Barbarossa, and this is actually a good thing because it is believable. Benson clearly tries too hard to make us believe that he knows Fleming's Bond so well. He knows the books and the stories, but he cannot write Bond well at all. His prose is strictly amateur night, and he seems afraid to stray from anything Fleming did. Gardner was British, highly educated, he was an experienced and successful spy novelist and writer, he was even in the armed forces and knew some things about spies from the second world war. All of this is evident when you read him. He is way out of his league in terms of Bond and in terms of writing novels period. Gardner was far from perfect, most of his books were flawed, but he delivered smooth tales and he was a decent writer, which counts for something.